Veteran filmmaker Martin Scorsese announced that he will make a film on Jesus Christ following his meeting over the weekend with Pope Francis in the Vatican, according to multiple reports. Scorsese, whose film "Killers of the Flower Moon" received a world premiere at the recently concluded Cannes Film Festival, said his declaration was in response to the Pope's "appeal to artists". "I have responded to the Pope's appeal to artists in the only way I know how: by imagining and writing a screenplay for a film about Jesus." Martin Scorsese Meets With Pope Francis During Italy Tour, Announces Next Film About Jesus.

"And I'm about to start making it," the American director of Italian descent said Saturday during a conference at the Vatican, reported entertainment outlet Variety citing multiple reports. Before attending the conference titled "The Global Aesthetics of the Catholic Imagination", Scorsese -- raised in a predominantly Catholic environment -- and his wife Helen Morris met Pope Francis during a brief private audience at the Vatican. Cannes 2023: Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert Di Nero’s Film Killers of The Flower Moon Gets a Nine- Minute Standing Ovation.

At the conference, the 80-year-old filmmaker also touched upon the meaning of his 1988 epic The Last Temptation of Christ and of "the subsequent step in his research on the figure of Jesus" represented by his 2016 drama Silence about the persecution of Jesuit Christians in 17th-century Japan. According to Variety, Scorsese's manager Rick Yorn did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding the director's new religion-related project.